Where’s the challenge to new data storage technology?
1 min read
Sony and Panasonic, it appears, are working on the successor to Blu-Ray, the current leading edge optical data storage format. Apparently, the two consumer giants are looking to create disks which can store 300Gbyte, rather than the 50Gbyte which Blu-Ray supports.
What's missing from this story is the rival camp. Over the years, such advances have only happened once a competing technology has fallen by the wayside. In the 1980s, for example, it was VHS against Betamax; in the data storage world in the 1990s, it was DAT against DCC; in the 2000s, Blu-Ray was challenged by HD-DVD.
Those have been battles largely fought in the consumer market. It appears that Sony and Panasonic's as yet unnamed technology will be aimed at the enterprise market. Whether the technology would be accepted by consumers is an interesting question; with more people streaming video on demand and storing data in the cloud, it may well be the days of the disk have passed.
Data centre storage is an equally interesting topic; operators are said to be showing more interest than ever before in solid state drives (SSDs), enabled by the cost per bit of flash memory – as low as $1/Gbit nowadays. Technologies such as the proposed successor to Blu-Ray will succeed only if they offer volumetric efficiency – lots of bits in a small space – energy efficiency and rapid access times. For these reasons, there are more than a few who believe the future lies with SSDs.
